Who Can Believe? Sentiment vs. Cynicism in Richardson's Clarissa

You actually accept a law . . . and respect it as absolute. So do I, but I go further than you, because I am beyond this law and can make it to suit myself. It is not the thing that is excellent, but I who am so; as the master of law and thing alike, I simply play with them as with my caprice; my consciously ironical attitude lets the highest perish and I merely hug myself at the thought.

—Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1821)

For readers of Clarissa, the attitude expressed in this quotation may seem familiar as resembling that of the novel's chief villain, Lovelace. As tormentor of Clarissa, Lovelace is a master conniver and performer, bending all rules and wills to the satisfaction of his own whims. He is an ironist and comedian, delighted at the prospect of exposing the fraudulence of Clarissa's "highest" claims of virtue. However, it is not Lovelace but Hegel who expresses, in derisive tones, as Christoph Schulte notes, his "contempt" for a particular, and to Hegel, "new" brand of amorality parading about as what we would now call Romantic Irony. Hegel's mockery of this ironic subjectivity appears suddenly in the context of a discussion about morality in which Hegel identifies irony to be the supreme evil. It is because an ironic subjectivity "is not simply an extreme immoral position within a moral discourse" but rather a position outside ethics, a position questioning "the entire discourse of good and evil" itself, that explains why Hegel considered irony to be absolutely evil. ¹ Significantly for Schulte, beyond Hegel's rather emotional reaction to irony, he offers neither a philosophical argument against nor a prescriptive cure for such evil. Rather, his very "contempt" for irony reveals the futility of arguing with an opponent who does not "take the objective ethical principles into serious consideration before subjectively overriding them" (32). Hegel avoids constructing a moral counter-argument to the ironic position because any discussion of ethics "must be preceded by the serious choice of both partners to argue, to judge, and to act in terms of good and evil" (40). But as Hegel implies, the ironist simply does not take such moral distinctions very seriously.

Hegel's contempt of the ironist surely mirrors Samuel Richardson's frustration with the readers who had his "whole Purpose inverted" in their cynical estimation of the virtue of his first heroine, Pamela. ² No longer innocent and unassuming, Pamela became, to some readers, the lusty and conniving Shamela bent on using all her arts to seduce the witless Mr. Booby. It is the conversion of such doubters of genuine virtue that Richardson seems to undertake in his second novel, Clarissa. In writing this novel, Richardson self-consciously places himself in opposition to his "worse than sceptical age," ³ appearing as a lone reformer crying in the wilderness, a "Son ofThunder . . . [come] to rouse the Public out of . . . its Stupidity." ⁴ While Hegel and Richardson confront arguably different barriers to belief—irony and cynicism—the question for both is similar: How does one persuade or "convert" another who is not inclined to acknowledge the premises of one's argument? How does belief occur? Can Richardson compel a cynic's belief in Clarissa's virtue if a cynic considers all good to be a form of evil in disguise?

Scott Paul Gordon addresses this question by suggesting that Richardson attempted to defuse the potential cynicism of readers largely by appealing to their sensibilities. By employing pathos and evoking tears from readers, by causing readers to feel the injustice of Clarissa's situation, Richardson can make a case for Clarissa's virtue in a way that bypasses the cynical critique of "motive." For Richardson to attempt to argue that Clarissa's motives are pure would be to concede the game to moral skeptics such as Bernard Mandeville, who contended that all motives for virtuous behavior...